Quote:
Originally Posted by Abecedary
You guys are funny. All this talk about why justification on most readers is terrible and not a single one of you experts has mentioned the single largest factor -- most readers don't have hyphenation algorithms (the H in H&J -- there's a reason why they go together). Being able to move blocks of 2, 3, 4+ letters to short lines would make a huge difference in the word spacing problem.
Also, many of you seem to be hung up on kerning. While kerning would come into play in some instances, tracking would have a much larger influence on the overall appearance (kerning refers to spacing between individual letter pairs, while tracking refers to the spacing over whole lines or blocks of letters).
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In my defense, I mentioned it and then deleted it. Really! No, really!!
It was originally part of my "fit as many words on a page" statement.
I don't know how books are printed, to be honest. Do they employ variable kerning or tracking? It doesn't look like it to me, but that could just mean they're doing a good job at it.
Pagemaker let you set tracking/kerning/font size/etc. anywhere, but I only changed the former two when I overflowed the column space in the Zine I worked on (font changes stuck out like a sore thumb). Changing kerning/tracking tended to look... obvious... against the rest of the article. Or changing it too much and applying it to the whole article also caused severely negative results.
Again, I am exceptionally skeptical of the claims about the causes of eye strain. But, as I said earlier, I am not going to deny that someone experiences it from a Reader if they say they do. It may be that
some people are very sensitive to certain artifacts, and others aren't at all. Look up "DLP TV Rainbow" for a case study in how some people can enjoy a certain technology, while others can't.
I
far prefer the LRF reading experience over the ePUB, particularly in the justified text arena. I don't think anyone claimed this, but I think it's implied that justification was left out due to eye strain. And I very much doubt they left out justification to mitigate eye strain... citations in my last post for causes of strain would bear this out.
-Pie